Where is the leadership in Public Relations

A friend sent me an interesting article showing that a Chief Petty Officer in the Coast Guard who was responsible for crafting the government's message about the BP spill also worked for BP's PR agency. While the article was unclear regarding the exact role of this person and if they worked on the BP account it did raise some distributing questions about the roles of public relations, ethics and leadership.

One issue PR people deal with is the concept that we are nothing but spin masters. Basically, many people both outside and, quite sadly, inside the organization, think it is our job to take manure and turn it into lovely fertilizer. The sad fact of the matter is that the PR profession and many of its leaders are the greatest factors in ensuring this is not simply a stereotype, but, sadly the state of affairs in PR.

Going back to the case of the Chief Petty Officer I was reminded of an ethics question posed to both doctors and lawyers in law and medical school respectively. They are basically told that if they need to ask themselves, "is this ethical?" comes up, then it is most likely unethical, or at best a gray area and they should avoid it. While lawyers are hardly seen as the paragons of ethics and doctors can be compromised, the fact is they have a set of rules in their professions which say what is and what isn't wrong.

What's also missing in PR that is found in both professions (legal and medical) is that young professionals entering the field are thrown into the field where they are required to make decisions, act professionally and deliver results. In this respect, PR is quite similar, where we diverge is that the doctor or lawyer is also given the benefit of constant feedback; good, bad or otherwise.

Sadly, in public relations, and marketing too, we see virtually no mentoring like what is seen in most professions. Rather we see an assumption that the person who has been hired at an entry level knows what they are doing and it is up to them to do it right. There is also what I would call a twisted sense among senior levels that this is how they learned it and if you can't swim you shouldn't be in the pool.

This all circles back to the issue about the Coast Guard CPO and BP. No one in an agency setting I have seen conducts anything even approaching real training for their staff. Very few people give honest and educational feedback to a junior PR person so they may learn. Senior PR people do love to bring junior people on the carpet and dress them down and self serving lectures are all a part of office politics but genuine and true leadership that challenges PR people to be critical thinkers and to engage in dialogue is very rare indeed.

I do wish to be clear this is not simply an agency problem. In some respects, the corporate PR world has a greater leadership gap than agencies. For one thing, they are usually held responsible for stroking the ego of a CEO or some other senior executive and telling them what they wish to hear and not the truth. Corporate PR tends to be about turf and privileges and not about doing the best job possible. It does mirror agency life in that junior people are expected to not make any mistakes but, at the same time, avoid asking any questions, even if they may learn from it.

The sad fact of PR is that there is a vacuum of leadership in the PR industry. Yes, that's a broad brush statement and I know personally there are very good leaders in public relations today. But compared to other professions we lack leaders who are willing to be mentors, teachers and to lay down a series of rules that will help define us as a profession. Would you trust a lawyer who wasn't a member of the bar? Would you trust a doctor whose license to practice has been revoked? Then why do we trust PR people who owe their positions to being able to survive the various business cycles. Remember the old story about what survives a nuclear war? Cockroaches and Twinkies? Well PR deserves to have its leadership be true leaders and not just cockroaches and Twinkies.